Calypso Chick

I feel like singing a calypso whenever I walk past these palm trees in the park.

I want to drink rum and coca-cola, eat mango, banana and fresh coconut and play the ukelele in a brightly-coloured shirt.

Sometimes if you sit beneath the palm trees you can hear the leaves brush like parchment and you are transported to faraway places where the sands are golden and the seas are spanish glass blue.

The waves brush at my bare feet, soft as whispers, leaving etched trails like love letters on the shore. I look out, out out to the sea where it attaches itself like silk to the sky and smell the sunlight on my hair, on my skin, on my old winter clothes and am elated. My heart grows vast, buoyant, it is a bird brave enough to fly up to the clouds.

No matter what, the palm trees make me smile. No matter how grey the day, no matter how lacking in focus I am, I walk past those scruffy-haired sentinels and I am uplifted.

And all at once I am Calypso Chick.